Burnt Money

ERIC HARRISON, Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle

Published
5:30 am CDT, Friday, June 7, 2002

Burnt Money
, a sexy, intense crime thriller from Argentina, starts like a Spanish-language version of
Ocean's Eleven
, with a group of criminals setting up a heist. But the heist is over in a flash. The bulk of the movie is its aftermath.

So much of this film feels familiar -- it also calls to mind Reservoir Dogs,Heat and Bonnie and Clyde -- that when Burnt Money takes one of its unexpected turns it stuns you. There are a lot of unexpected turns.

The opening introduces us to Angel and Nene, gay lovers who live in a dingy Buenos Aires apartment. A narrator informs us they are called "the twins." After showing how they met -- in a grimy public restroom -- the narrator notes the one significant way they are similar: "the still eyes, the lost glare."

The sharp focus on character and relationships, and the novelistic way the story is told through successive narrators, featuring internal monologue, sets us up for one kind of film. Then the story pulls back to involve the "twins" in the heist. Neither they, nor the story, are as they seem.

The robbery of an armored car goes badly. The thieves, one of them wounded, must go into hiding.

Corruption and official brutality are integral parts of the story though not the focus. The film, which is based on a true story, casually acknowledges that the lines separating cops from robbers are blurred, but its gaze stays trained on the robbers.

For a "gay" film, Burnt Money brims with graphic heterosexual couplings. Nene swings both ways, and Cuervo (Pablo Escharri), the getaway-car driver, has a girlfriend who figures prominently in the plot.

After the men flee to Uruguay, police beatings persuade the left-behind girlfriend to give them up.

Their identities known, the robbers must stay out of sight, tensions building. Anti-gay sentiments add to the rancor. They don't trust each other -- everyone keeps a gun at hand -- but bonds eventually develop.

Under these conditions, however, even Angel and Nene begin to distrust each other, though the strains on their relationship are different. A religious man who claims to hear voices, Angel has stopped having sex. Nene cheats on him.

Because the men go stir-crazy and begin to go out in public, their whereabouts can't stay secret forever.

During a big gun battle, however, we realize that, wherever the movie has taken us, it is, at heart, the sort of relationship story it seemed to be in the beginning, only played out against an action-thriller backdrop.